In the last two months, Micro Focus has merged its APJ partner programs to combine the heritage Micro Focus partner community and the heritage HPE Software partner community. This year’s awards are the first to recognise the combined partner sets from both programs.

“The focus over the next 12 months is to work with Micro Focus partners to ensure they are gaining value from the full solution and technology suite across the newly-formed Micro Focus,” said Todd Parsons, ANZ channel director at Micro Focus. “Partners will be able to expand and have a stronger and more differentiated story with customers as a result. The change in the awards is directly linked to that strategy. Citadel, Kinetic IT and Revolution IT have significant and long-term relationships with Micro Focus, and the awards reflect that investment and level of quality outcomes they deliver for our customers.”

According to global market intelligence firm, IDC, the partner landscape will continue to change and partner requirements are evolving along with it. IDC predicts that, by 2021, at least 30 per cent of the channel will not exist in today’s format. And, as of the end of 2018, at least 20 per cent of partners have restructured to a vertically-centric, customer-oriented sales and solution organisation.

Micro Focus supports its partners in their journey to deliver a broad range of Micro Focus solutions to the benefit of their customers. Micro Focus has:

significantly rationalised its distribution base in the last 12 months to let distributors more aggressively invest in helping Micro Focus enable, grow and acquire partners in the wider solution stack, and provide a faster ramp to expand their capabilities and revenue base around the wider solution portfolio

focused the recent APJ Partner Leadership Summit on giving partners greater awareness around the expanded product and solution suite, and providing deeper insights into the commercial and market capabilities and the impact on the channel

invested in a range of enablement activities and events to bring the channel’s skills and capabilities up to understand the wider solution and product portfolio

conducted a critical review of the newly-combined channel partners to rationalise the partners it works with and develops, based on a desire for mutual investment, with a narrow focus on partners that truly want to work with Micro Focus to extend market reach

developed a new partner program that rationalises resources and is designed to make it easy to do business across Micro Focus with one place to interact.

Supporting quotes

Jamie Duffield, CEO, Revolution IT, said, “We have a long history of working with Micro Focus and we are pleased to receive this award in recognition of our continued success in providing Micro Focus solutions to our customers, in the DevOps space in particular. DevOps is key to the delivery of the transformation work we do with clients looking to accelerate and optimise solution delivery. Our local partner manager helps us navigate the global processes across a range of activities such as funding enablement and joint business plans, which is critical to our success.”

Ryan Harris, general manager – capability and delivery, The Citadel Group said, “Our goal has been to provide cost-effective and innovative solutions to help customers leverage greater value in their investment in enterprise information management solutions. In 2016, we set about architecting Australia’s first and only cloud-hosted, ISO27001 certified Content Manager solution, Citadel-IX. This investment has resulted in a solution that is highly-secure, consumable by customers as a true as-a-service offering, and rapidly deployable. It also provides access to organisations’ critical information assets anywhere, anytime and on any device.

“Receiving this award is a proud moment for our team of highly skilled engineers and consultants who are the true innovators behind this world-class solution. Micro Focus’s commitment to partnering has been crucial to Citadel’s success. Micro Focus continually strives to support its partner community and offer excellent support at all levels of the business.”

Brett Roberts, chief product officer, Kinetic IT, said, “Kinetic IT is humbled to be the recipient of the Micro Focus 2018 Customer Innovation Award. It’s great to be recognised for our focus on long-term business benefits and our use of innovative technologies and solutions to drive better services to our customers and communities. Our partnership with Micro Focus spans nearly 25 years and remains an ongoing enabler to our success.”

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About Micro Focus

Micro Focus helps organisations run and transform their business through four core areas of digital transformation: Enterprise DevOps, Hybrid IT Management, Predictive Analytics and Security, Risk & Governance. Driven by customer-centric innovation, our software provides the critical tools they need to build, operate, secure, and analyse the enterprise. By design, these tools bridge the gap between existing and emerging technologies—enabling faster innovation, with less risk, in the race to digital transformation.